


Learning to Walk Again

by lellabeth



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abused!Phil, Angst with a Happy Ending, Clint and Natasha are the best, Domestic Violence, Feels, M/M, Phil taking his life back, eventually C/C
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-04 07:21:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4129530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lellabeth/pseuds/lellabeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> No one bats an eyelid at fingertip-shaped bruises wrapping around his forearm. No one asks why there is a graze pulling at the skin of his cheekbone. No one wonders or worries or cares, and he tells himself that’s how he likes things.</i>
</p><p> <i>Some days, Phil even believes it. </i></p><p>Phil has long since given up on his life, but Natasha and Clint refuse to give up on him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **this fic contains multiple references to and instances of domestic violence. be safe when choosing whether to read it.** please let me know if you think there are more tags I should add.
> 
> this is mostly a fic about Phil finding himself and starting to live again, but it becomes C/C towards the end. Eventual happy ending, promise!

Phil met Sara ten years ago when she was in town to play in a symphony. He’s always been attracted to both men and women, no particular preference either way, but he had liked the slim dip of her waist, the lean muscle of her arm. Their dates were sparse but good, conversation flowing well between them. They were periods when they were rarely in the same country, but there were emails and texts to get them through, and Phil liked that he had someone to listen to him talk. He’d always been somewhat of a loner, making friends but never making connections, and something inside him told him the same was true with Sara - she was comfortable, pleasant enough, but she didn’t make him feel anything extreme.

Phil thought maybe it was just him - he’d never had those kind of feelings about anyone, after all. He’d never felt his heart race or his stomach flutter. He is sensible, pragmatic Phil Coulson, and he tells himself he is not settling.

Two years in , Sara tells him he is afraid of commitment. He has only ever worked for two companies doing two jobs; he has never changed the brands of foods he eats. He is the personification of commitment, but he doesn’t tell her that. Instead he invites her to move into his apartment, wondering why the words taste so sour. He lets her replace all his furniture and take down his Captain America prints. His spare bedroom stops being a memorabilia museum. Sara makes him buy a different brand of cereal.

These changes happen little by little, bit by bit, and then one day he comes home and realizes it feels like he’s in a stranger’s apartment. Still, he knows that relationships require compromise, so he goes along with it.

When Sara becomes withdrawn, he blames it on her new job as a classical music teacher. He knows she would rather be traveling still, but she tells him they cannot have a proper relationship that way, so he accepts her barbed comments about him never being home and makes more of an effort to do so.

It happens in stages, really: he loses pieces of himself, small chunks that he doesn’t notice disappearing, until one day he looks in the mirror and wonders who the tired, haggard old man staring back is.

The first time Sara hits him, it is during an argument about him having to leave the country for a month.

He tells her to be gone when he gets back.

Loneliness is a seed planted in him long ago, though, and it has already taken root. When she messages him telling him that she is sorry and that she loves him, he makes himself believe her. And then it happens again and again, and he doesn’t think he believes her, but he thinks maybe he doesn’t even care.

Not anymore.

**

There is a running joke around SHIELD that watches could be set according to Phil Coulson’s timekeeping. He is never late, never flustered or rushing. He lives his life through a set of practiced, perfected routines, and only exceptional circumstances can change that. The junior agents call him an android. The agents around Phil call it kissing Fury’s ass.

Phil doesn’t call it anything, but he knows full well it is his way of trying to find a semblance of control over a life that feels like it has spun away from him. He is nothing more than a distant visitor to his own life, as though he’s fallen into the slipstream of being someone else and never quite left again. It’s the only explanation, really, for the way he is living now. Because Agent Phil Coulson, he is always pristine, always level-headed and sardonic and so professional it cuts, so professional that no one thinks to look beyond it to see  _Phil._   He is a suit, not a man. He is an agent, not a person. Somewhere down the line, he has lost himself, and it feels like he only ever finds pieces of that old person. He only ever finds cracked shards, too jagged to fit together again. If there had ever been a fire within him, it had burned out years back.

So he does what he can: he falls back on patterns and lets their regularity comfort him. He wakes at 5:28am so he could be conscious when Sara gets up at 5:30, so he can feign sleep without having to be vulnerable and helpless. He is an expert in faking shallow breaths, of ignoring the way the scent of her perfume makes everything inside him roil and shake, like a house set on crumbling earth. Phil times his departure from bed right as she heads to make a quick breakfast at 6:00. There are days when he’s sure he won’t be able to get up - when all his limbs have turned to water and he’s convinced that this is it, that he’s finally just wasted away into vapor, but he forces himself. He is Phil Coulson, after all, and he does not take days off.

He shaves without meeting his eyes in the mirror ( _you don’t have the right jawline for a beard, it’s too soft)_. He washes himself in the shower, feeling the divots and raised skin covering his body ( _you’re lucky I’m willing to settle for you, Phillip)_. He shampoos his hair and adds some conditioner ( _see how thin it is, old man, who’d want you anyway?_ )

When he hears the slam of the front door over the spray of the shower, he allows himself five minutes. In these five minutes, he isn’t an agent of SHIELD or an ex-army-ranger. He is just Phil, tired and hurting and alone.

He presses his back into the tiles of the wall, the scars there dragging and catching on ceramic as he slides to a sitting position. He moves his head underneath the fall of the shower, and it is like being waterboarded in Kosovo, it is like drowning in Krakow. He does not move.

It clogs his nose, floods his eyes, plugs his throat and makes his choke, and he does not move. In the safety of his bathroom, with a locked door and enough rushing water to mask it, Phil cries. They are not delicate, small tears, they are heaving, ugly sobs, tortured and wracking his all of his broken body.

On the worst days, when he feels each nasty word slicing into his softest parts, when he feels a hundred years older than his age, when his insides are ribbons, he thinks about not moving. He is hollow, he is a husk, and the water will fill him up. He will finally float after a life of sinking, finally breathe after a life of drowning.

Sometimes, he wonders if this is his penance. Years of taking the lives of others; maybe this is life’s way of taking his own. Every piece of almost-happiness he finds is nothing more than gauzy overlay, darkness slipping in all around the edges. He wonders sometimes if he is a person who was never built for happiness, if he is the misshapen, malformed mistake at the end of the production line.

But Agent Phil Coulson, he doesn’t have room for thoughts like that. There is no space in his life for sadness or depression or any feeling at all, so when his five minutes are over, he moves his face from the water. He hauls himself back to a standing position, he rinses the conditioner from his hair, and he steps out of the stall and towels himself dry.

He does not look in the mirror. He does not acknowledge the soreness of his eyes or the thickness of his throat. He walks into his bedroom and gets dressed. He shrugs on Agent Coulson just like he shrugs on his shirt, and he buries Phil at the bottom of the laundry basket with his towel, along with everything else sullied and stained.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **this fic contains multiple references to and instances of domestic violence. be safe when choosing whether to read it.** please let me know if you think there are more tags I should add.

Some days, Phil is grateful for his job solely for the reason it gives him an excuse for being hurt.

No one bats an eyelid at fingertip-shaped bruises wrapping around his forearm. No one asks why there is a graze pulling at the skin of his cheekbone. No one wonders or worries or cares, and he tells himself that’s how he likes things.

Some days, Phil even believes it.

There are times, though, when a well-meaning shop assistant or barista will give a sympathetic wince as they look at the blot or scratch currently marring his face. They’ll give him a soft smile; a consolation token kindness. Phil hates these the most - it makes him feel like there is something  _wrong_  with having these bruises, something bad about these scrapes. It dissolves joists on the steel frames he has built to keep his chest from caving in. It reminds him that there is a world outside of the tiny one he’s been living in for these past few years, and the thought of it terrifies him.

None of this can compare to how it feels the day Hawkeye finally asks him about it.

He’d been the one to recruit Barton a couple of years before. It had ended with Clint recovering from a gunshot wound to the thigh but with a job at SHIELD waiting at the end of it, so he hadn’t held a grudge. Clint had told him that night that he was tired, too much so to keep running, and Phil had felt a bond with the man ever since. He’s the only handler that Barton will follow every order from.

He’s been expecting the question. Phil has felt the heat of Barton’s stare burn like alcohol onto an exposed cut, sting like neosporin on a split lip. Phil is hyper-conscious of himself each time it happens, making sure to try to slip in a reference to sparring or a mission that will explain things away as casually as possible. Barton never questions him, but his gaze lingers sometimes, and that feels like too much of a question in itself.

“Another bruise, boss?”

Phil cannot stop the split-second tensing of every muscle in his body, and he prays that not even Hawkeye’s sight is good enough to have seen it.

“Sparring with Hill is deadly,” he replies. He wears his lies like other men wear a tie - into his wardrobe, choose one, try it on for size, wear. Repeat daily. It’s almost routine at this point. Living with Sara has honed his deception skills more than any SHIELD course ever could.

“Hill’s in Anchorage. Has been since last Tuesday.”

And this is the problem with lies as familiar as Phil’s, they spill off the tongue like water before you can notice the oil-spill. He’s usually better than this, but his ribs  _ache_ , and the HYDRA men had all seemed to aimed right for them like they had a homing device. Everything felt too fraught for him to safely sleep last night, so he worked in his office until early-morning light poked through the cracks between the blinds. He is worn out and flat exhausted in any and every way possible, and he does not have the energy for this right now.

“My mistake,” he says, turning his back.

Which is another mistake in itself, he realizes as soon as he hears Clint’s hiss. “Fucking  _shit_ , sir, when did all that happen?”

He knows exactly what Clint is seeing, can recount exact measurements of each patch of raised skin and length of each etched line. “Rangers,” he lies again. It sounds better than  _a glass thrown at my face and I only just managed to turn away_  or  _stiletto heel jammed into my side._ When he turns to give Barton a rueful look, expecting the man to just shake his head and say he knew Coulson was a badass, he is instead met with eyes staring directly into his own. They are slate-gray, like rain, but somehow warmer than the ocean in summertime, and Phil feels a genuine catch in his throat just having someone look at him that way. Clint’s mouth is turned down at the corners, his face set into sad lines that Phil hasn’t seen him wear before.

“Are you okay, sir?”

Not even close, he wants to say. Not even a little bit, and I can’t remember the last time I was.

He imagines finally unlocking the steel bolt holding back the words that flood inside him, their sharp edges cutting him all over. He thinks about how it would feel to finally,  _finally_  tell someone, to not have this shameful secret curdling inside his stomach. He knows Clint’s file, can logically argue that if anyone would understand being small and vulnerable, it is Clint Barton. He tries to imagine the words leaving his mouth, tries to think of a way to spill his secret without making a mess that’ll never be cleaned up.

But then Agent Woo walks into the locker room. The man is supposed to be in California, but somehow he is here, interrupting this exact moment.

Phil has never been a great believer in signs, but he is sure this is one. All at once he remembers who he is when he is here at SHIELD - when he is out in the world at all - and he steps back, resolving to patch up the cracks in his demeanor with cement.

“Just fine, Barton.”

He turns away again, but it’s long seconds before he senses Clint step back.

Phil closes his eyes and wonders why he can taste the bitter sting of regret.

**

He almost dies in Budapest. A knife slides right through the bars of his ribcage and into the vulnerable pockets of flesh between. There is blood soaking his skin, seeping over Barton’s hands. Phil is barely conscious but he clings on long enough to hear Barton’s sharp inhale when he catches sight of Phil’s torso properly for the first time.

Years of missions, both Rangers and SHIELD, combined with recent war wounds of a whole different ilk have left Phil’s body a broken, busted mess. He has divots where skin should be smooth, gnarled twists where there should be bumps of bone, shiny burn scars and puckered starbursts where bullets once lay.  

He thinks he’s going to die in those frantic, agonizing minutes of Barton trying to stop Phil’s life melting into a grimy carpet. He thinks that this is the end of everything. He is going to die feeling embarrassed and ashamed of all Barton had seen, knowing the mess the callouses on the man’s fingers are skating over. He is going to die, feeling sad and unbearably alone and so fucking angry at the world he could split in two.

He is going to die, and part of him is glad.

When he wakes up, there is a second of sharp regret right behind his sternum. It’s just him and Barton in the room, only the sound of steady beeping from a heart rate monitor sitting with them.

“Gotta tell you, sir, didn’t think you were going to make it.”

He rolls his head on the pillow, notes the dark circles below Barton’s eyes and exhausted tinge of his whole demeanor.

“Me neither.”

“You scared the shit outta me. I’d have always been known as the specialist who let Coulson get killed.”

Phil smirks just a little, even though it pulls at the stitches on his chin. “Would have improved your reputation ten-fold, then.”

“Harsh words from a man whose guts were trying to break free from his insides a few hours ago, sir. Besides, SHIELD would have fallen within a week without you. Guess I should be glad you didn’t kick it and leave me without a paycheck, right?”

Maybe it’s the drugs in his system, maybe it’s just that he’s tired, but Phil doesn’t check his bitterness before he speaks. “Good to know my life is worth something.”

The truth of it catches him off-guard, and there is a mortifying minute where Phil thinks the prickle of something hot behind his eyes will manifest into actual tears. He swallows it down, down, until it is nothing more than pain in his stomach.

“Hey,” he hears, softly, and there is a warm hand pressing over his. It is rough but not like  _that_ , not  _bad_. “I shouldn’t have said that, Coulson. Sorry.”

There is strained silence for a second, and then Phil snorts. “I think you can call me Phil when you’re wearing more of my blood than is currently inside my own body, Barton.”

“Everyone loves a hero, sir. And it’s Clint.”

Phil isn’t ashamed to admit that the few minutes they spend in silence together, hands still touching lightly, are the most comforted he’s felt in years. It should feel weird to be sitting like this with Barton of all people, but it’s somehow not. It’s as if Barton knows exactly what he needs and doesn’t think twice before giving it to him. Somewhere, a long time ago, Phil remembers wishing for moments like this.  

When Clint leaves that evening, Phil feels just a little less adrift than he did before.

**

After that, it’s as though Clint thinks Phil needs looking after or something equally incomprehensible. Barton is suddenly everywhere Phil is scheduled to be when he’s on base, sometimes with bitter coffee just the way Phil likes it, sometimes just with a smile and a head-nod before he walks on his way.

On missions where he and Clint work together, he swears he can feel the aim of a recurve bow fixed firmly on him. Clint sets up a private comm line just for himself and Phil, calling out snarky commentary that Phil wishes he didn’t want to laugh at. Barton keeps tabs on injuries Phil receives, giving him quiet tips on how best to treat each one. In the showers afterward, Phil’s skin will prickle with the weight of Clint’s sharp gaze, and he knows Clint is counting bruises, cataloguing cuts. There are always too many, always the wrong shape, and Phil knows he is playing with a fire big enough to burn his whole world to ash

Clint must know, he realizes after the third post-mission shower in a row of Clint asking him where a certain mark came from. Clint must know, and this is the only way he can think of informing Phil of that.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> big thanks to jhscdood for cleaning this up!
> 
>  **this fic contains multiple references to and instances of domestic violence. be safe when choosing whether to read it.** please let me know if you think there are more tags I should add.

Not much keeps Phil awake at night. He has killed so many people he's lost count, maimed probably triple that figure. He has never lost sleep over it, never been kept awake by ghost-white faces and fictional lives floating across his mind. Instead, Phil is kept awake by thoughts about the way Clint's face got tight when he saw the bruises on Phil's wrist, or the way Natasha had glanced at the cut on his cheek and given him an expression softer than he's ever seen her wear. He lives not in fear of alien invasion or Tony Stark finally taking over the world, but of his own little life crumbling down all around him.

He knows Clint won't hold his silence forever. He knows too that he has formed a bond with Natasha, in the way that starving stray dogs flock to one another, and that having Natasha count you as her own is almost as dangerous as having her count you as her enemy.

It has been three months since they brought her in, Phil being lauded as the agent who swept away the web of the Black Widow. The official report claims that Phil had managed to get the upper hand during a fistfight - something he fully admits will never happen - but in reality, there had been a hunted, desperate edge at the back of her eyes that Phil recognised all too well when she was kneeling on his chest with her hands around his neck. He had used the last of his gasping, choked breaths to tell her that he could offer her safety. There they were, in a dark alley in the pouring rain, one flayed heart to another, and he promised her he would protect her from the things that haunted her - the tangible ones, at least.

And Natasha, she had stared at him, fingers still claw-like pressing into his throat, and she had asked a single question of him.

 _Why would I trust you?_   

 _Because I know how it is to be trapped_ , he'd told her, voice hoarse from her grip and from something else. _Because I know being safe seems impossible, but I'll do anything to give it to you._

Natasha has always seen more than just what is before her, and this time was no exception. She had removed her hands and slumped her body next to Phil's, every line of her seeming to sag at once. His heart had been beating hummingbird-quick as they sat together on rough asphalt, Clint's voice strained over the comm in Phil's ear.

Clint and Natasha are formidable together. If Natasha counts Phil as one of her own, then she counts Clint as a part of her being, taken from her rib and turned into flesh. They communicate without saying a word, minute twitches of expression speaking all that needs to be said between them.

In his worst dreams, he imagines the two of them confused by his inaction and disgusted with his weakness, and he has dreams where they both leave him alone again. It’s irrational and unrealistic but it’s also pervasive, and Phil cannot shake the feeling that somewhere in their Morse code of blinks and twitches, they are unravelling his every veil.

**

The day that they confront him is almost the worst day of Phil's life.

Two people who have endured lifetimes of lies, and they stand before his desk and tell him that they will burn the sky to ash to keep him safe. Two people who trust no one but each other and himself, and he can offer nothing of the sort in return.

The things they say, it's like a fist colliding with whole layers of bruising. Things about him being important and deserving and _worth it_ , things Phil has not believed true of himself for years. Natasha tells him she understands and her eyes are red-rimmed, and Clint promises Phil that his home is always open, always safe.

There’s no water nearby but Phil is drowning all the same, right here in the bland coffin of his office, right here with no life raft.

“Sara is small,” he says, and it is as much a defense as it is a confession. Natasha’s fingers twitch. “I’m Ranger-trained, special ops bred. I… I’ve been with SHIELD for years.”

Natasha leans forward over the desk, her eyes intent on his own. “I could have killed my trainers forty different ways any time I liked. I never raised a hand to them.”

But Phil feels as if Natasha has raised a hand to him, as if she’s cracked his ribs right in two. “It’s not the same.”

“She hurts you,” Natasha replies. The stark truth of it hangs heavy in the air, and Phil can hardly take a breath. “She hurts you, and it is not okay.”

“She loves me.”

“No,” Clint says, his back turned to them both. “She doesn’t. Love doesn’t hurt like that. It’s not meant to hurt like that. It doesn’t give you bruises or make you flinch when someone moves too close. That isn’t love at all.”

“I could stop her any time.” Phil’s eyes are wet and so are his cheeks, and the tang of salt is sharp on his lips. “I could’ve restrained her or fought back. I _let_ her do those things. I didn’t leave. I didn’t argue. I just took it all.”

“Because you thought you deserved it,” Natasha replies softly, and it is not censure but understanding in her voice. “Because love edged with barbed wire is still better than nothing when nothing is all you have, otherwise.”

“It’s weak.”

“It’s strength,” Natasha says, and now she is fierce, now she is fire.

Something inside Phil breaks then. It gives way and he can feel everything, every cruel word, every ounce of flesh he has given. He can feel it all, and it _hurts._ It hurts so much he doesn’t think it’ll ever stop. Did Atlas’s shoulders feel like they were made from hay and cinders at the end of it all, too? Does the weight of the world get so heavy that it grinds flesh and bone to grit?

“I’m so goddamn tired. I feel like I’m constantly fucking fighting, and for what? What do I get back?” He slams his fist down onto his desk. “I’ve given sweat and _blood_ for this country, to protect these selfish people. Who’s protecting me?”

He picks up some papers on his desk and throws them to the side, and then he fists his hand around his pot of pens and hurls them at the wall. He doesn’t register Natasha’s pained noise or the sight of Clint standing with his hand over his mouth. Phil doesn’t see anything but the sheer _injustice_ of it all. His stack of folders is next to be launched across the room, followed by the empty coffee cup by his elbow. It breaks into tiny shards, cracked porcelain littering the floor.

As quickly as his anger flared, it recedes the same, like a lapping wave melting back into the sea. Now, his voice isn’t steel or iron. Now it is lost, now it is hopeless and quiet and painfully sad, and Phil is all those things and more.

“When I’m cleaning my own cuts in my bathroom, hoping my bones aren’t actually fractured and that my shirt will hide my bruises. Who’s looking out for me?”

“ _Phil_ ,” Clint says in a choked voice.

Phil tries to get a hold on himself, but it’s too far gone for that now. He feels like a wad of paper that’s been soaked through, like he’s just crumbling. He is bent double in his office chair, sobbing, right in front of the only two people who have ever cared enough to see past his disguises, and he isn’t ashamed. Not when he is so exhausted that a whole lifetime of sleep won’t fix it. Not when his insides are nothing more than the dust leftover from a landslide. Not when Natasha’s fingers are brushing across his head and Clint is a warm presence at his side.

For the first time in years, Phil isn’t ashamed.

He isn’t ashamed when Natasha uses her soft fingers to wipe his sore eyes, or when Clint tells him quietly that they’ll both go to Phil’s apartment with him so he can collect some things.

Phil thinks he should feel unsettled or laid bare now that everything is exposed, but he doesn’t. He feels like someone is seeing him, like someone is acknowledging he exists outside of a shooting score or mission completion ratio. They are pulling away the bricks of the cell he’s kept himself locked inside piece by piece, and it’s like he can finally feel the warmth of sunshine on his skin.

They are seeing _Phil_ where the entire galaxy and all the life within it see only Coulson.

Phil thinks that maybe, he can begin - in time - to see himself.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hugs to jhscdood for making this better.
> 
>  **this fic contains multiple references to and instances of domestic violence. be safe when choosing whether to read it.** please let me know if you think there are more tags I should add.

When Sara sees his packed suitcases by the door that night, she does not shout.

Instead, she cries, and it is somehow even more violent than rage would have been.

“But I love you,” she says through sobs, and he wonders if she understands what the word means.

“We’re meant to be together,” she tells him as she grips his arm tightly, and he doesn’t say that he believed that, too - that all the horror in his life had given him this as punishment.

“I’ll change,” she promises, and he wishes he could believe her, but the past six years are written in Braille across the scar tissue of his body, and their story is one he cannot forget.

There is a moment where he almost breaks. Sara cups his face in her palms and tells him that she thought he was the one for her, and he wants it so badly that he almost wavers - who else will have him, busted and ugly and used-up? But then he remembers that wanting someone to love him does not equal wanting _her_ , that wanting love is not wanting whatever this is. And everything is mixed and muddled inside his head, but this is the most sure he’s been in years. He refuses to let that change now.

Sara is like a shark, though, and his hesitation must have been blood in the water, because suddenly her tone changes. “I’ll try not to let your mistakes get to me.”

Her fingers are too tight.

“I won’t tell you when you do something wrong.”

Her grip hurts.

“I’ll stop trying to make you a better person.”

Her words are venom.

But Phil, he is not soft now. Not when he has Natasha and Clint ready to take on the world if he needs them too. Not when he feels like he has a chance to finally live again.

He prises her hand off his arm as firmly as he can without hurting her. Her hold breaking is like a metaphor, like the bars have just fallen from his cell.

Sara knows it, too; he can tell by the way she curls in on herself.

When she turns to face him, he barely recognizes her face without lines of anger contorting it, cruel words turning it ugly. She was beautiful once, he thinks, back when he first met her. He tries to see that person in the worn, bitter edge of her jaw but he can’t. They were happy lifetimes ago, and it’s that thought that hurts most of all. He doesn’t know where things went wrong, only that the change in her was like dark ink to water, tainting it and turning everything black. He misses her - or who she _was_ , at least - because he hasn’t known that woman for years now.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and it is heavy and weary and Phil wishes he was a better person so he could believe her.

He doesn’t.

He has flinched from the sharp slap of her palm against his flesh too often, has felt an all-encompassing ache right down to the marrow of his bones too frequently to believe in words like sorry from lips stained with his wasted love.

Phil steps past her to open the front door of the apartment, passing the cases out to Natasha and Clint. He turns to get his coat from the rack and his scarf from its hook. He leaves his set of keys on the table just inside the entryway. He walks through the door and closes it behind him.

He does not look back.

He takes a week off work, then two, and Fury is so worried by it that a third week of vacation is forced on him. He writes an automated email response telling people he hasn’t died. He laughs when Natasha gains access to his SHIELD account to add a line about him having to recharge in his pod at the end. He sleeps on Clint’s couch. He eats the meals Natasha cooks for him. He lets her pet his hair or lie next to him at night. Both of those things make him uncomfortable, but they also make him feel like he has a heart that’s beating again.

Natasha sends him a link to an abuse survivor’s forum and everything inside him just revolts. He reads post after post, hands clasped over his mouth and sobs spasming from deep inside his stomach as he reads stories just like his own, of people living the same horrors he went through. There is the gut-punch of realizing that he has lied to himself for years - telling himself that it wasn’t that bad or that it wasn’t really abuse, that her being a woman meant she couldn’t do anything to him that he didn’t allow - but reading these stories, he realizes that none of that was true. He thinks of himself as a victim for the first time in his life, and it is as damning as it is freeing.

There is advice on being gentle with yourself, but Phil doesn’t know how. It’s like sleeping on burlap for years and suddenly switching to silk, like his skin itches from the kindness of it all.

He lets Clint introduce him to Dog Cops, even though he can never follow an episode because he can’t hear over Clint saying, “Oh hey, this part is awesome!” every two seconds. He dreams of Sara, still. He dreams of Clint throwing him out because Phil just can’t pull himself together, and he wakes up resolving that this will be the day that he _pulls himself together_ but it’s like he’s just numb.

He is a series of actions; singular verbs and no adjectives. He is an algorithm without a problem. He is a bird born without wings. He wonders if healing feels like a set of stitches being ripped out one by one, whether he should expect hurt feelings to fade like scars, rather than ever disappear.

And then one day, he realizes he’s almost finished his shower and he hasn’t cried a single tear. He’s become so used to the gnawing knot of anxiety in his stomach that it’s only noticeable in its absence. Later,  Natasha sits next to him with their shoulders touching and he doesn’t feel like his skin is crawling with a thousand ants. Clint tells one of his terrible, awful, no good jokes, and Phil laughs until his stomach hurts in a way he’d forgotten it could.

He is being reborn, cell by cell, second by second, and it is everything at the same time that it isn’t anything at all.

When he and Clint watch Dog Cops that evening, he leans over to rest his head on the broad flat of Clint’s shoulder.

“Good to have you back, Phil.”

Phil wants to argue with that, because he’s not sure he is back or whether he’s someone new entirely who’s there for the first time, but the soap smell of Clint’s skin lulls him into a dreamless sleep instead.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hugs to jhscdood for making this better.
> 
>  **this fic contains multiple references to and instances of domestic violence. be safe when choosing whether to read it.** please let me know if you think there are more tags I should add.

**

Things aren’t magically better after that. Phil thinks that’s perhaps the cruelest part of it all - that he’s finally been let out of a cage only to realize his wings are clipped. He drops a plate of Clint’s and his whole body tenses expecting a blow. He’s met with sad eyes and Clint telling him softly that it was “just an accident, don’t even worry about it.” Phil learns to embrace these bad moments as inevitable, but with Clint’s help he learns to celebrate his small victories, too. He doesn’t flinch when Laura from accounting sneaks up behind him one morning. He sleeps a whole night through on his own without waking once.

The first time Phil steps from the shower and catches sight of his skin, marred by old scars but free of any new ones, he cries. His skin is clean. _He_ is clean.

His sobs are messy and so loud that Clint comes running in. Phil babbles the reason for his tears and Clint just wraps him up so tight, so safe, and they stand in the steam-hazy air of the bathroom and hold one another.

He finds hobbies he likes. He throws out CDs and movies he never cared for yet watched anyway; he makes up old recipes that he used to love yet stopped eating. It’s like he’s been on a long vacation and forgot he even had a home, but now he is coming back to it. It’s busted and broken down but it’s still standing.

Phil is still standing.

He starts seeing a therapist. She asks him to write down five things about himself every day that he thinks have value. At first, he struggles to think of even one. He sits at Clint’s uneven kitchen table on one of the mismatched chairs for an hour, trying to think of one thing he contributes to the world that is worth something.

“What’cha doin’?” Clint asks as he starts chopping vegetables for dinner.

“Trying to write good things about myself.”

“And you thought one piece of paper would be enough to write ‘em all down? Rookie mistake.”

Phil can’t stop his smile even as he rolls his eyes. Clint is kind of a huge dork and just as annoying as he’s always been, but somehow Phil doesn’t mind it so much anymore. Clint is constantly there for Phil, whether he needs subtle reminders to take care of himself or just company watching shitty TV shows.

“I’m struggling to even think of one.”

Clint stops chopping and turns to face him. “Is it cheating if I give you the first one that I think of about you?”

Phil snorts. “Is it possible to cheat on therapy homework?”

“If it was, you’d be the first one to come up with rules around it.”

“Just give me the reason. I can’t go back with a totally blank piece of paper. That’s entirely too depressing.”

Clint looks down at his bare feet curled against tile. “You care.” He shrugs a shoulder. “Even from the very first mission I had where you were handler, you acted like you actually gave a shit about me as more than just someone with good aim. You asked me opinion and actually fuckin’ listened to it. I’d never had another handler - another person, even - treat me like I was their equal. It made me feel like what I had to say was important or something, you know? I never forgot that.”

Phil swallows. “I was just doing my job.”

“The fact you think that just confirms that you should have enough things on that list of yours to fill a whole book up.” Clint turns back to the kitchen counter. “White or sweet potato?”

“You should be ashamed of yourself for even asking that question.”

“Well, hey now,” Clint says, midwestern drawl syrup-thick. “Can’t blame a simple country boy for not wantin’ none of them fancy vegetables.”

“I don’t think you’ve been a simple country boy a single day of your life, Barton.”

“S’why you’re the best, boss.”

Phil just bites his lip so he doesn’t laugh. The pen in his hand touches paper and he thinks of Clint’s answer. He gets to work writing it down and thinks of another related to it a minute afterward.

By the time Clint announces that dinner is ready, Phil has a whole side of paper full of his good qualities.

Clint’s smile is the biggest Phil has ever seen on him.

**

Months go by of him completing successful missions, of seeing his therapist at the weekends, of warm evenings with Clint at his apartment. He doesn’t feel the need to leave and Clint has told him more than once that he likes the company, so they stay living together. Phil has finally emerged from the chrysalis, has shed his skin and is healed and new, ready to face the world once again.

When he tells Natasha how he plans to spend his days off, she is stone-faced. She stares him down but he knows this is just Natasha, scared to show she cares so showing nothing instead, and he waits her out.

“This is a terrible idea.”

Phil shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Maybe? What next, you asking me to go with you to the ballet? Taking Clint to the circus? Us all facing our dark pasts together?”

“I’d never ask that of you."

“But you’d ask it of yourself?”

And Phil swallows at that, because yes he would, yes he _is._ But it feels right, volunteering at the helpline for male abuse victims - feels like if something has to come out of all the shit he lived through, it should be kindness. If something comes from the dirt he suffered through, it should be a flower, not more weeds.

When he starts a few weeks later, he expects it to be tough. He knows it’ll be hard. He doesn’t expect it to feel like a fishhook right behind his navel, pulling more every second. Phil hears shaking voices and words soaked in tears, and it burns like he’s swallowing lit matches. He thinks maybe he can’t do it, that he just isn’t ready to carry the weight of another’s pain just yet.

Then one day, a man calls and says he is at the end of his tether, and Phil knows just how it feels to be held together by too many fraying threads. He tells the man about his own story - not enough to identify him, but enough to make it clear he understands exactly how the other man is feeling. He gives advice on leaving and lists numbers of shelters willing to accept men.

He ends by saying, “You’ll be okay, you know? Everything is really terrifying right now, I know, I _know_ , but you will be okay. You will." 

When he gets home that evening to find Clint half-asleep on the sofa, the television blaring brightly on his exhausted face, Phil thinks that maybe okay is just the starting point.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> endless thanks to jhscdood <3

At his worst, Phil had been sure his heart would never heal right.

He wouldn’t ever let himself be vulnerable again. He’d never be blinded by love and affection or let a relationship keep him tied to a person.

And then one morning, he finds Clint covered in bandages and running on 2 hours of sleep after a week-long mission in Sao Paolo, literally crying over spilled milk that he was going to use in his coffee.

That’s when he realizes he’s in love with Clint Barton.

See, it happens like this: Clint running Phil baths after a too-long day hunched over his desk. A day spent at the beach in the middle of winter, red noses and padded coats. Clint painfully grateful when he sees that Phil set aside dinner leftovers for him to eat when he got home. A milk run in Costa Rica that ends with them both in linen shirts and shorts, drinking cocktails beside a pool. Clint stroking Phil’s hair after a bad dream. Countless nights spent together on a lumpy couch, laughing so hard their stomachs hurt. Clint, warm arms and warmer smile; full of fear and showing none of it.

It happens in drips and drabs, loving Clint Barton. Phil isn’t even sure when it started - maybe back when he started thinking of Clint as ‘friend’ rather than ‘asset’, or maybe even before then. Maybe it was when Clint had a nightmare so horrible that he sobbed even in his sleep and Phil spent the rest of the night wrapped around him, a barrier between Clint and the world. Maybe it was watching countless episodes of trashy TV shows, shoulders brushing and snarky comments flying. Maybe it was on a rainy night in the wrong part of Chicago, Clint with blood on his teeth and a gunshot wound in his thigh.

Maybe it was during all of those moments or the slivers of time between them, but whenever it had happened, it feels right in a way nothing else ever has.

It feels like everything has somehow been building to this moment, like a piece of a jigsaw has slotted into place and Phil can finally see the whole picture. Because loving Clint isn’t fear, it’s freedom - it’s safety and affection and everything good, and Phil never wants it to stop. If there is any one person he trusts in the world to never hurt him, it is Clint. Their lives aren’t ordinary, not even close, but Clint makes him feel like maybe he can have it all. Like this could really, honestly happen.

So he wipes Clint’s tears and pulls the other man to bed before tucking him under the covers .

“Sweet dreams,” he whispers, because he hopes if he says those words often enough that’s all Clint will have.

“G’na dream of you,” Clint says back, nothing more than a breath before he starts snoring.

Phil brushes the hair back from his face and presses a kiss to his forehead.

**

Because he is Phil Coulson, he plans multiple ways to tell Clint.

He buys two tickets to a show he knows Clint has been desperate to see. The day they’re meant to go, Phil has to deal with an insurgent cell in Washington, DC and doesn’t arrive back until four days later.

He plans a picnic in the park, painstakingly preparing sandwiches and sides. It rains for the next week.

He buys three handmade arrows, carved shafts and etched fletchings. He leaves the bag with them inside on the subway.

He gets their favorite bakery to make cupcakes spelling out WILL YOU DATE ME. By the time he has Clint open the box, the icing has melted and the letters are unrecognizable.

Phil Coulson is a patient man, but that patience is being sorely tested.

In the end, all his plans are for nothing.

He’s at home one night, dozing off in front of Cake Boss when he hears, “aw, donuts, _no_.” Phil is well-versed in Clint-speak by now, and knows this can only mean bad things. He enters the kitchen to find Clint’s face covered in powdered sugar and chocolate frosting.

Clint looks at him bashfully, eyelashes coated white. “I forgot the packet was open and they all fell on me.”

Phil tries to contain his laugh, but it’s hopeless. He laughs until there are tears streaming out of his eyes and he’s clutching onto Clint’s side. Clint is doing the laugh Phil loves best, the one where he’s mostly silent except for moments where he’ll suddenly bray like a donkey, setting them both into further fits. It takes ten minutes for them to calm down and another ten for Phil to wipe the mess off Clint’s face, and afterwards they both flop onto the sofa.

Phil reaches his hand across to cover Clint’s. Clint’s head is resting on the back of the couch, his face turned toward Phil. “Yeah?”

Phil nods, and Clint curls his fingers around Phil’s palm.

Maybe it doesn’t always have to be grand gestures and rehearsed speeches. Maybe it can just be this instead, entwined fingers and secret smiles.

Phil shifts his hand slightly, extending his index and pinkie fingers and his thumb, and resting them on the back of Clint’s hand. The smile that spreads across Clint’s face reminds him of the first break of dawn across the sky.

“I love you, too,” Clint tells him, leaning forward to kiss Phil’s mouth before pressing his forehead against Phil’s.

It should feel like an ending, Phil thinks - he’s finally exactly where he wants to be, after years of being stuck - but with the spark of Clint’s skin against his, everything feels like it’s just beginning.

 


End file.
